We've talked a lot about change up until this point, global, organizational personal. We've talked about what changed does to us and even developed a sense of what kind of shape you're in in terms of dealing with change, and maybe where you can improve. But rarely is changed the heavy lifting. More often than not, it's the transition that doesn't seem it's the transition where the real challenge lies. So let's figure out what's the difference between change and transition. Let's start with change.

One simple way of defining change is the act of making something different. We used to live in this place, and now we're living in this place. We used to have this as a structure in the organization. Now we have that as a new structure. I had this boss and now I've got top boss, etc, etc, etc. change can happen very quickly.

It's focused on the new thing I want to be in the new house. This is going to be a great new piece of software. It's focused on that outcome. It is indeed an event we make a decision, we'll implement something and then something change Transitions different. Here is a transition line superimposed on top of the change line. Now, transition is the internal reorientation.

It's how we adjust or how we adapt internally to an external event. Now, this internal reorientation certainly takes place individually. But it also takes place collectively in our work groups and divisions, departments, organizations, whole cities, whole countries, depending on the magnitude of the event can go through a transition. The thing about transition as it relates to change is it's always slower. It takes more time. It's gradual, and it can be messy.

It's not nearly as clean cut and dry as change. Somebody wants to spread change to me as a warm knife to a hard pound of butter and very quickly, you end up with two pieces of butter, whereas transition is more like a toughy pole. You warm Tuffy up and try it. pulled apart and you end up with a mess before you'll end up with two chunks of toffee. The other thing I'd like you to think about here is this thick blue line positioned on the change line underneath it, the timing of transition is different. We're usually in transition well before the actual change itself takes place.

The three phases of transition unfold before, during and after the change. Those three phases of transition are known as separation in between, and integration. To help you understand that you already know a lot about this because you've been in transition before you may not know you know, it. Transition seems to make more sense initially in hindsight than it does when we're in the middle of it. So I'd like you to think about the last time you moved. Now this is relatively fresh for me because we've just recently helped my dad move.

Now keep in talking about this move, downsizing his place and moving in To another smaller place for upwards of a year. And I can see inside him things start to unsettle. And he started to unplug. And he started to claim some things that what he was still living in the old place. But all the while he was starting to separate, consciously or unconsciously away from his old world, the actual change itself just recently took place. And it took three and a half hours, it was really a pretty straightforward move.

So the actual event was really short. Now he's in this new place, but it's not home yet. It's gonna take a while for him to settle in and truly feel like this now is home. So I'd like you to think about that from your perspective as it relates to a recent major change like a move and that's a pretty big change for most of us and try to understand this gradual reorientation we go through that takes much longer than the you defensive change itself. Now, I would love to tell you that this gradual reorientation, this flow of separation in between and integration always unfolds perfectly. And then all we need to do is get better at it to speed it up.

I mean, that would be the theory. But the reality this is really quite different. Here are some examples of different ways transition can play out. This first one is an example of a merger between two hospitals. And this is a transition simply that didn't happen while the merger had taken place. People would not let go of the past, there were two factions.

And depending on which side of the house you were on, you're one of the good guys or one of the bad guys and this was a very adversarial environment and certainly a challenging one to be a part of. Here's another example. This would be an example of a transition where we're lost in between. It was in this case, a picture of a reorganization that people had some people had to some degree disconnected from some things of your world. But the leaders were nowhere in sight to help people through the confusion of the time in between and point to the new way of doing things. people describe this as circling the drain and some people want to go back some people love the confusion.

Some people wanted to go what direction they thought was the right way to go. Other people have just left the organization. It was a challenging time. So here's another one. And this is a delayed transition. This would be one particular unit of an organization wanted nothing to do with a change that had come out of headquarters and literally just parked it on a shelf.

And for many months, in fact, it was a year and a half until this one particular leader of this one particular part of the organization was called into head office and was essentially read the riot act. We've been watching Are you going to get this done or not, and fairly short order because he decided he did want to stay with the organization to after 18 months finally get his people on board with this new initiative. Now, the reality is that typically what happens because transition takes so much longer than the change is that we may have all of these and many other variations unfolding simultaneously. All the while, more and more change is being implemented. So we'd like to try and avoid these options or variations on the theme as much as possible. So then what we need to learn how to do is to deal with each of these three phases of transition.

Now, here's a graphic and we'll use this to create a bit of a transition map in a little bit. But this would be the old world that used to be on the left hand side In the New World, as we want it to be on the right hand side, all of the work of getting through transition separation in between an integration, somewhere in between. So the three phases of transition, leaving that old world behind being intentional about letting things go. The second phase of transition is time in between a very confusing and bewildering chaotic time are no longer where we used to be. And we're certainly not yet where we're supposed to be often overwhelmed and feeling out of sorts. And the third and final phase of transition is when things start to settle in and we start to get connected or re establish connections or establish new connections, and we get committed to the new world.

So change versus transition.